By Professor Daizal Samad
One of our habits in Guyana is to bemoan the idea that all the finest Guyanese minds have left for other places. We really mean the U. S. A., the UK, and Canada. I do not know too much about the brain drain, as we call it. While we moan and groan about that, we pay little attention to the talent right in front of our eyes.
Talented people in all kinds of areas: mechanics, plumbers, farmers, business people, cooks, nurses, teachers, sportsmen and women, policemen and women, students, the children. We cry about loss and forget what we have. And we really have no idea of what to do with talent when we do see it. And so the youth feel abandoned, set adrift on a wide, wide ocean.
Hopelessness in the young leads to horrible consequences for any nation. So we need to show them that which they most long to see: their own possibilities!
Talent must be ICED. That is, it must be identified, cultivated, employed and deployed. If we look carefully outside of ourselves for a second, we would see talent everywhere. A boxer in a ring, an athlete striding, a young woman with grace, a student bright with promise, a honeybee keeper coaxing honey, a young person with a talent for science or a gift with language, and so on.
It is easy to identify talent if we remove ourselves from our own self-concerns. Yet, it is not easy to spot precisely where the talent may be; too many parents vaunt their children for the most ordinary things. Pride blinkers us.
Once talent is identified, it must be cultivated. Without being properly cultivated or nurtured, talent withers and dies. The cultivation of talent necessitates proper attention by all involved. Parents, teachers, elders, community leaders, coaches, trainers, religious leaders, sports and educational bodies. And all ministries must be front and centre! Especially the Ministry of Sports, Youth and Culture, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health. Cultivation does not mean dragging children away from normalcy. It means creating academies of all sorts that would look to the welfare of talented children, irrespective of what area in which that talent might be. Sports managers and academic leaders must be on board, as well as psychologists and time management specialists. Of course, we have to nurture those people as well.
I have seen too many of our academic, policing and sports people being thrown by the wayside. Two enormously talented cricketers with all kinds of knowledge are now driving hire cars! One of our national amateur boxing champions is now cutting cane. One of the best police trainers is just sitting at home. Employ them as mentors, coaches, trainers. A nation that honours not its heroes is a nation that remains in darkness. I know of one great contributor to the University of Guyana Berbice Campus (UGBC), and to education in Berbice, who was simply cast aside – with no ceremony. Just used like a piece of tissue and thrown on the roadside.
Age does not make us crippled to give. The developed nations that have all kinds of resources and talent do not do this.
We do! Would their nations throw away people like Ricky Ponting, Michael Jordan, Sachin Tendulkar, Ian Botham, Imran Khan, Sanath Jayasuriya, Donovan Bailey, Alexis Argüello, just to name a few sportsmen? So let us identify talent, then cultivate talent. Then we employ that talent. We pay them and cherish them for doing us proud as a nation.
Let us establish job creation programmes that place people in places where they can give. Most of the time, these people do not want much. They simply want to give what they have. It is up to us to accept with grace and gratitude. Our youth will gain.
If our youth gain, Guyana’s future is assured. If we do not, this nation is condemned to the mediocrity we see parading itself shamelessly each and every day.
Identified, cultivated, employed. Then we deploy that talent. We send those talented people to every corner of this nation. Our nurses, doctors, teachers, coaches, trainers, academics, farmers, fishermen and businessmen and women.
We do this in order that more talent could be identified, cultivated, employed, and deployed again.
Even if they teach us about discipline and self-discipline, our nation is better off.
Blessings and all good things shall rain upon this land.
